ECO Institute — Nature Specials, Beckett, Summer 2026

Course Number:	EDU 5710 S31
Instructor:	Sean Beckett, M.S.
Location:	In-person at North Branch Nature Center & online.
Dates and Times:	July 27 - September 27, 2026 from 9 am - 5 pm each day & online.
Credits:	3 Graduate Credits
Tuition:	Tuition is set by and payable to North Branch Nature Center

Course Description

For 15 years, North Branch Nature Center’s Educating Children Outdoors (ECO) program has embedded with local public schools to bring standards-based lessons to the fields, woodlots and city parks nearby. Together with classroom educators, our NBNC Teacher-Naturalists have designed and taught many lessons on ecology, physics, geography, math… and music, visual art, engineering, storytelling, cooking, crafting, and play! During this course we’ll focus on ECO lessons based in “Specials” while still tying in academic standards. Expect to teach literacy through an oral storytelling workshop, physics through natural instrument-making, and ecology through harvesting and cooking wild foods.

This course is designed to help homeroom teachers bring more art+ into their forest classroom. In our work teaching outdoors in local schools, we’ve also noticed that music, gym, and art teachers are often tapped to help with outdoor learning – a key goal of this course is to build skills to help translate the expertise of those instructors into outdoor learning. Throughout it all, we will learn, play, and create in perhaps our most fun week of summer professional development offerings.

Audience: All Elementary and Middle School educators with a Bachelor's Degree

Course Goals & Objectives

Course Goals:

Build games that illustrate NGSS, Common Core, and Proficiency-based Learning Standards, and tune them so they are engaging to play.
Practice identifying plants and other natural materials for use as food, crafting, or art materials for outdoor lessons.
Weave, dye, cook, paint, draw, and build musical instruments with natural materials.
Develop a final project that can be immediately useful to your outdoor teaching.

Course Objectives:

Become familiar with a wide array of activities that bring art, music, engineering, and storytelling into an outdoor classroom.
Study the tools and narrative techniques of oral storytelling.
Develop a complementary background to facilitate collaboration with Specials teachers at your school.
Practice recognizing opportunities for cross-curricular lessons outdoors.
Learn to recognize unique material opportunities for art, music, and engineering offered by outdoor spaces across the year.

Course Schedule

Course will take place in-person, in the field and in the classroom, on the days listed in the scheduled course meeting time above. Course will begin at North Branch Nature Center and may visit several sites to cover course content in the field. Nightly reflections for each of the in-person days will be due the following morning. The course continues in an independent format. A final project will be due on September 27, 2026.

Required Readings/Resources

Costs for required readings/resources, if any, may not be included in the course tuition. Please contact NBNC for more information.

Butler, A. (2023). Educating Children Outdoors: Lessons in Nature-Based Learning. Cornell University Press.

Beames, S., Atkinson, M., & Higgins, P. (2023). Outdoor learning in theory and practice (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Ernst, J., & Theimer, S. (2024). Nature pedagogy: Practices for integrating nature and learning. Teachers College Press.

Mann, J., Sutherland, L. A., & Cooper, C. (2022). Getting out of the classroom and into nature: A systematic review of nature‑specific outdoor learning for school‑aged children. Frontiers in Education, 7, Article 9149177.

Dillon, J., & Dickie, I. (2024). Outdoor learning in education: Nature‑based pedagogies and transformative experiences. Springer.

Neddo, N. (2015). The organic artist: Make your own paints, papers, pigments, prints, and more from nature. Quarry Books.

Thayer, S. (2010). Sam Thayer’s field guide to edible wild plants: Of eastern and central North America. Foragers Harvest Press.

Laws, J. M., & Lygren, E. (2020). How to teach nature journaling: Curiosity, wonder, attention. Heyday Books.

For additional course or registration information

Sean Beckett

(802) 229-6206

This course requires registration with North Branch Nature Center (NBNC) first. Please click on the Register Now! link below.